Web Services middleware developer Cape Clear Software today announced a $16 million second round of funding. The round includes new investments from venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock, with Accel's Kevin Comolli and Greylock's Aneel Bhusri joining the company's Board of Directors.

"The software business has been creating and solving incompatibility for decades," O'Toole said. "The common denominator for this problem has been that every solution put forward has been designed for rocket scientists and requires a massive investment in consultancy. The result of this approach is that the actual software element is very small. We are changing the rules. Cape Clear believes it is time to provide the tools that all developers can use, to make incompatibility a thing of the past, to deliver, if you like, ubiquitous middleware."

Cape Clear Software was founded in Dublin, Ireland in September 1999. The company currently employs 55 people in Dublin, London and Walnut Creek, Calif. Using industry standards, Cape Clear enables developers to link diverse back-end systems such as Java, Enterprise JavaBeans, CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), and Microsoft.NET. The result is the creation of new applications which take the best components of these different systems and allow them to be combined in new solutions.

Cape Clear secured a $2 million investment round in April 2000 led by Irish VC firm ACT Venture Capital.